Two books on rats were published and reviewed in 2024. I read only reviews and found them very intriguing.
Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker:
"...Two new books take up the subject of Calhoun and his rats. The authors of the first, “Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun” (Melville House), are a pair of British researchers, Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams, who for a time both taught at the London School of Economics. The second, “Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity” (University of Chicago), is by Lee Alan Dugatkin, a historian of science at the University of Louisville. Both books cast Calhoun as a visionary. Both also portray him as eccentric to the point of crankdom...."
Simon Ings write in The Spectator, UK:
"...Among rodents, a rising population induces stress, and
stress reduces the birth rate. But push the overcrowding too far (further than
would be likely to happen in nature) and stress starts to trigger all manner of
weird and frightening effects. The rodents start to pack together, abandoning
all sense of personal space. Violence and homosexuality skyrocket; females
cease to nurture and suckle their young; abandoned, these offspring become food
for any passing male. The only way out of this hell is complete voluntary
isolation. A generation of ‘beautiful ones’ arises, that knows only to groom
itself and avoid social contact. Without sex, the population collapses. The few
Methuselahs who remain have no social skills to speak of. They’re not
aggressive. They’re not anything. They barely exist...
...But whether we behave exactly like rats in conditions of overcrowding and/or social isolation is not the point. The point is that, given the sheer commonality between mammal species, something might happen to humans in like conditions; and it behoves us to find out what that something might be before we foist any more hopeful urban planning on the proletariat. Calhoun, who got us to think seriously about how we design our cities, is Rat City’s visionary hero, to the point where I started to hear him. Observing some gormless waifs staring into their smartphones at the bottom of the escalator, I recalled his prediction that ‘we might one day see the human equivalent’ of his mice, pathologically crammed together in ‘a sort of withdrawal – in which they would behave as if they were not aware of each other’..."
Artist: Tomi Um, The New Yorker
